6

THE MAOIST MOVEMENT IN NEPAL

Asish K. Roy

The ultra-leftist politics, which had burst forth in the 1960s and continued till the middle of the 1970s in India, Nepal and then Bangladesh acquired a new dimension with the rise of the Maoists in Nepal in the late 1990s. This has not only disturbed the otherwise quiescent political scenario in the region but is also likely to aggravate the existing regional geostrategic equations if and when Nepal falls to Maoist rebels. Before analyzing the roots of the Maoist movement in Nepal, let me present a clear picture of the geostrategic location of Nepal and then try to bring into relief the fallout of this movement in South Asia.

Placed as she is between the two giant Asian neighbours, India and the People’s Republic of China, the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal occupies a very sensitive position insofar as the power-political equilibrium in South Asia is concerned. After the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Nepal suddenly became a very sensitive factor in the strategic calculus of the mandarins in New Delhi’s South Bloc as this tiny country conforms to the colonial British strategic concept of a ‘buffer state’ between India and China.

As a result of the contiguous international borders with India, Nepal has always been of vital importance to the extremists of diverse hues in the transborder Terai region. Even a casual cartographic look at the region is enough to see why. On the one side, beyond the Naxalbari tract oflndia, once the cradle of the neo-Maoist movement, lustily hailed by China as the ‘Spring Thunder’, is the river Mechi, across which lies Nepal. On the other, across the Mahananda river from the Phansidewa tract of India, which also shot into limelight during the Naxalbari peasant uprising, is Bangladesh. The geo-political location of the Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa belt could hardly be overlooked. Up in the northeast of West Bengal, Naxalbari is situated in the slender ‘neck’, which is India’s only vital land corridor that connects Sikkim, Bhutan and the country’s northeast region, connecting Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Arunachal and Meghalaya with the rest of the country. It has two international borders which are quite porous. In the west is Nepal, which is at a distance of only 4 miles, and in the east is Bangladesh at a distance of 15 miles. China is also not very far from this region on the northern side, as China’s Tibet is only 60 miles away. It is the international borders between India and Nepal, on the one hand, and between India and Bangladesh, on the other, that have always been of great strategic importance to the ultra-leftists of these three neighbouring countries.

In the early 1990s the political development in Nepal underwent drastic metamorphosis. The country witnessed a surging people’s movement for democracy, which brought about a dramatic change from absolute Monarchy established by King Mahendra to a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democratic political process based on a multiparty system under the new Constitution of 1991. Unfortunately, however, within a short period of the restoration of democracy, the ‘revolution of the rising expectation’ of the Nepali people was allowed to disappear because of the volatile character of the role structures of Nepal’s major political players. Right from the beginning Nepal’s political process was vitiated by endemic changes in governments, political uncertainties, inter and intra-part squabbles arising largely out of personality clashes and greed for political power in total disregard of deteriorating social and economic conditions. The governments were falling like ninepins. It is rather interesting to note that between 1991, when parliamentary democracy started functioning under a ‘Crowned Republic’, and February 2005, when the Sher Bahadur Deuba ministry was dislodged by King Gyanendra through a dramatic palace coup, as many as 13 incumbents held the prime ministerial musical chair at Kathmandu. It is in this perspective that the origins of the communist movement, and for that matter, the Maoist revolutionary movement in Nepal should be analysed.

How It All Began: A Retrospection

In fact, the etiology of the left and left extremist politics in Nepal could be actually traced back to the critical demographic and socioeconomic conditions in the 1950s and the 1960s. The population in Nepal was estimated to have grown to around 11 million in the 1960s with a density of 190 per sq mile. The whole Nepalese population can be roughly divided into three distinct segments: the Parbityan (people residing in the hill areas), Modeshi (people living in the plains), and the Newars (the segment of population concentrated in the Kathmandu valley).

Traditionally, the ethno-linguistic barriers among the three groups largely inhibited the growth of a unified Nepalese society. In other words, the diversity in ethnic and linguistic patterns has proved to be a serious obstacle to the emotional integration of the Nepalese people.

The Agrarian Scenario

Like all underdeveloped countries, Nepal has also been confronted with the inescapable problem of population explosion. Nepal’s drive for economic prosperity is the fact that the land resources of the country are strictly limited. While as high as 90 per cent of Nepal’s population depends on farming for subsistence, only three seventh of the total arable land had been brought under cultivation by the late 1960s. The critical agrarian situation of Nepal in the 1960s could be best explained by the fact that about 80 million people were dependent on about 36 million acres of land under cultivation. Most of this cultivable land, however, was under the possession of only 450 affluent families of Nepal till 1964. What made the situation even more complicated was the heavy rural indebtedness of the cultivators, who were just surviving at the mercy of the landlords. Although agriculture traditionally plays a key role in Nepal’s economy as it constitutes about 70 per cent of that country’s gross national product, the actual tiller, as Wolf Ladejinsky has pointed out, has been living on ‘the ragged edge of penury’. The Sahukar (village moneylenders-cum-intermediaries) exploited the peasants by taking advantage of their abject poverty. While lending money to the peasants at an exorbitantly high rate of interest, the Sahukars forcibly realized many times more than the principal. In course of time, the Sahukars, who had been forfeiting the mortgagor peasants’tenancy rights, appeared on the scene as the new landowners.¹

It was in this situation that Nepal’s land reform legislation was enacted in the form of the Land Act of 1964, which laid down the following action plan:

1. Abolition of the zamindari system;
2. Imposition of ceiling on land ownership;
3. Imposition of ceiling on tenancy holding;
4. Security of the tenancy rights;
5. Abolition of subtenancy, and
6. The stoppage of loan repayments to the private lenders.

In 1965, the government launched an all-out drive to implement the provisions of the Land Act of 1964. Despite this, the land reform measures did not produce the desired results. It has been suggested in an empirical study of rural radicalism that the peasantry most susceptible to radical movements lives in an area where the tenancy law is irregular, where the old rural elite has been weakened, and has had its traditional value system modified by political education and articulation, literacy, entry into the market, proximity to towns, and accessibility to communications. These peasants are usually sharecroppers, agricultural labourers or dwarf cultivators (i.e. they hold land smaller that one acre) and are found in certain crop areas such as rice fields and plantations that are labour-intensive, or one-crop areas susceptible to market fluctuations rather than areas with multiple crops. This analysis suggests that insofar as Nepal’s western and terai regions are concerned, these areas provided the most fertile breeding ground for any future left extremist movement in the 1960s that synchronized with the adventurist activities of the Maoist extremist elements within the Communist Party of India (Marxist) at the Naxalbari, Kharibari and Phansidewa police stations of the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, close to Nepal’s eastern district of Jhapa.²

Communism in Nepal: The Gestation Period.

Like the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), the Communist Party of Nepal(CPN) had an extra-territorial origin. Although some isolated Nepalese intellectuals had been drawn towards Communism and a few of them had been active among the peasantry and landless labourers since the 1930s, the CPN was founded only in 1949. In the late 1940s, some Nepalese Communists trained in India were reported to have been very active in certain parts of eastern Nepal in organizing insurrectionary operations among the workers and peasants under the spell of the ‘left-adventurist’ programme of action of the Ranadive leadership of the CPI inspired by the radical thesis of A.A. Zhdanov. Later, burning in the conviction that some foreign imperialist powers were ‘conspiring with the Ranas to convert their country into a military base’, the hardcore Nepalese Communists met at Kolkata on 15 September 1949 and formally announced the birth of the Communist Party of Nepal. Among the prominent Nepalese Communist leaders present at that meeting were N.G. Vaidya, Narayan Vilash, Nar Bahadur, Durga Devi and Pushpalal.

Internal dissensions had always plagued the Communist Party of Nepal right from its formation in 1949. Throughout the 1950s, the party vacillated on the single issue of overthrowing the Nepalese monarchy. In December 1960, the Nepalese Parliament was dissolved and all political parties were declared illegal by a royal decree. At the same time, King Mahendra assumed all governmental powers. Two years later, the king promulgated a new constitution which reaffirmed his extensive powers. It also provided for a four-tier system of representative bodies, starting at the lowest level with the village panchayat, proceeding to intermediate levels of district and zonal panchayats, and topping the structures with the national Panchayat, which was empowered by the Constitution to debate bills approved by the king.

As a result of this ban on political activities, a number of the more extremist and anti-monarchical Communist leaders were forced into exile in northern India, from where they tried to operate clandestinely in collusion with their Indian counterparts. This militant group of Nepalese Communists broke off from the Communist Party of Nepal in 1962 and held its own party congress.

It may be pointed out that unlike the Indian Communist movement, the Communist movement in Nepal was rather deeply affected by the shock waves of the Sino-Soviet ideological rift, synchronizing with the ‘peaceful transition to socialism’ thesis expounded at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956. It is an undeniable fact of the history of the international Communist movement that the net result of the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute was the splintering of the Communist movements all over the world, caused by long-standing factional feuds which precipitated the formal organizational splits.

The split in the Nepalese Communist movement in 1962 between the pro-Soviet majority and a rather determined pro-Chinese minority was preceded by a pitched ideological battle. A group of pro-Chinese Communists, mainly led by the intellectuals in the CPN, had been waging a serious ideological struggle in support of the Chinese strategy and tactics of revolution. Immediately before the formal split in 1962, this group circulated a pamphlet entitled ‘The Present Situation and the Communist Party of Nepal’ (Vartaman Paristhiti tathaNepal Communist Party), written in the Nepali language.

It is interesting to note that different factions within the CPN (later it was reported that as many as 19 Communist groups had been active in Nepal since the 1990s) were operating in close collaboration with the Indian left extremist elements of diverse ideological orientations and loyalties. Ever since the split in the Indian Communist movement in 1964, the extremist elements within the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the new political outfit, had been persistently trying to force the Maoist strategy and tactics of revolution on their party’s leadership. Following the split, the highly activised cells of the CPI(M) in the northern districts of West Bengal, particularly in the Darjeeling district, were entirely captured by the militant elements espousing Maoism. Many of their leaders operating in the Terai region (locally called morang) were rather well-known for their political convictions, which had little difference from Mao’s philosophy of an armed peasant revolution. The most important figures were Charu Mazumder, Jangal Santhal, Kanu Sanyal, Khokan Mazumder (alias Abdul Hamid) and Kamakshya Banerjee, who had started infiltrating the cells and mass organizations in the Darjeeling district unit of their party from the beginning of 1965.

It has already been emphasized that because of her contiguous international border with India, Nepal had always been in the ken of the ultra-leftist elements on either side of the border for its sensitive geostrategic location. It transpired later that the Naxalbari neo-Maoists frequently used eastern Nepal as a convenient sanctuary.³

It is an interesting fact of history of the Indian Communist movement that, in 1951, the CPI abruptly suspended the armed peasant struggle that the Maoists within the CPI in Andhra Pradesh had been leading in Telengana since the late 1940s because the Indian Maoists did not have as firm a contiguous rear as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was said to have had in the contiguous Soviet territory after the PLA had completed the 25,000-li (12,500 km) long March. The once highly secret inner-party document of the CPI entitled ‘Tactical Line’, which had been allegedly prepared by the Kremlin ideologues and circulated among the central committee members of the CPI at the Third Party Congress held at Madurai in December 1953, clearly reflected the party’s despair. It declared that ‘in India, partisan warfare, as the experience of China has shown, is one of the most powerful weapons… At the same time, it must be realized that there are other specific factors of the Indian situation which are such that this weapon alone cannot lead to victory… Despite the advantages enjoyed by the revolutionary forces (in China), they were repeatedly encircled by the enemy. Time and again, they had to break away from this encirclement and threat of annihilation and migrate to new areas to rebuild again. It was only when they made their way into Manchuria and found the rear of the Soviet Union that the threat of encirclement and the threat of annihilation came to an end, and they were able to launch the great offensive which finally led to the liberation of China. It was thus the support given by the existence of a mighty and firm Soviet rear that was of decisive importance… And above all, the geographical position of India is such that we cannot expect to have a friendly neighbouring State which can serve as a firm and powerful rear’.⁴

Thus, compared with Telengana, Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district and Jhapa in eastern Nepal presented better strategic advantages required for protracted guerrilla operations because of the convenient rear base at China’s Tibet which could be used by the Indian ultra-leftists and their Nepalese counterparts. Although there is no hard evidence to suggest that these elements could at all have used Tibet as a sanctuary, it is certain that immediately after the Naxalbari peasant uprisings, many extremists, including Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, slipped into the Jhapa district of Nepal, which adjoins the Naxalbari tract of Siliguri subdivision. These fugitive extremists were often given shelter at Jhapa by the Nepalese Maoist leader, Gopal Parshai.

It is now no secret that the ultra-leftist elements in Nepal had been in close touch with the Indian Maoist groups in Siliguri ever since the India–China border war of 1962 and they had been jointly engaged in all sorts of subversive activities along the international border between India and Nepal. Following the Chinese mobilization in the northeast, the intelligence network of the Government of India became very active in the Terai region because it was apprehended that large-scale ultra-leftist violence would be unleashed in the northeastern region. The shifting of the CPI(M) headquarters from New Delhi to Kolkata in 1964 strengthened the suspicion of the Indian government. Immediately after the all-India swoop by the police on the entire leadership of the CPI(M) in the last week of December 1964, G.L. Nanda, the then Union home minister, declared in an AIR broadcast to the nation that the Communists had been preparing for an ‘armed revolution’ and guerrilla warfare ‘to synchronise with a fresh Chinese attack, destroying the democratic government in India through a kind of pincer movement which was hoped for, but could not materialize in 1962’.⁵

Later, in a statement in parliament, Nanda charged the Communists with supporting China over Tibet and the India–China border war, disloyalty to the country during the war, dissemination of pro-Chinese and anti-national documents, splitting the CPI at Beijing’s call and preparation for subversion and violence. It was also alleged in 1964 that during the India–China border war in 1962, the ultra-leftists in the CPI had planned to form a so-called ‘People’s Republic’covering West Bengal, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Nagaland, Mizo Hills, NEFA, and, if possible, the Himalayan states of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, with headquarters in Kolkata, with the Chinese Liberation Army operating from Tibet.

The Chinese Connections

Two events of importance in the international Communist movement spurred the rapid growth of thinking along the Maoist line among the Communists in India and Nepal. First was the vigorous reassertion of the Maoist strategy of the ‘people’s war’ by Lin Biao, a former CPC ideologue and defence minister, in September 1965 in a lengthy thesis entitled ‘Long Live The Victory of the People’s War’, which upheld the Maoist model of revolution for the Third World. The second and the more sensational event was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which erupted in 1966.

Commending Mao’s strategy of people’s war as ‘the common asset of the revolutionary peoples of the whole world’, Lin Biao asserted that it had the ‘characteristics of our epoch’ and that ‘it has been proved by the long practice of the Chinese revolution to be in accord with the objective laws of such wars and to be invincible. It has not only been valid for China, it is a great contribution to the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples throughout the world’.

Lin’s strategy was aimed at linking all the peoples’s wars in the Third World into a global front against the United States, reinforcing each other and ‘merging into a world-wide tide’. He concluded with a frontal attack on the Soviet ‘revisionist’ ideological positions, highlighting the general line of ‘peaceful transition to socialism’.⁶ It is pertinent to note in this context that Lin Biao’s thesis left a blistering impact on the Maoists in the subcontinent because it reaffirmed the conviction of the Maoists in the revolutionary strategy of Mao Zedong.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China in 1966, which closely followed the publication of the Lin Biao’s article on the invincibility of the people’s war, greatly inspired the Maoists in India and Nepal to consolidate their positions. The sharpening of the Mao-Lin ideological conflict acted as a potent factor in forcing the Maoists in this region to come out openly in favour of Mao Zedong in order to challenge the ‘neo-revisionist’ leaders of their Communist parties. They contended that Mao had been persistently fighting for inner-party ideological purity—a claim they had been voicing for quite a long time. They explained the appearance of the Red Guards as a manifestation of the need to prevent China’s younger generation from going the way of the Soviet ‘Social Imperialists’.

It is worth mentioning in this context that under the impact of the GPCR in China in 1966, the leadership of the Communist Party of India was unofficially divided into two distinct groups—the Beijing Group and the ‘the Sanghai group’. The Beijing Group was led by B.T. Ranadive, Harekrishna Konar, Promod Dasgupta. Backed to the hilt by the Maoists within the party, moved ideologically much closer to the pro-Mao group in China. Other prominent CPI(M) leaders like A.K. Gopalan. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Jyoti Basu and so on belonged to the Sanghai group, which sympathized with Liu and his anti-Mao followers. However, a similar trend was not noticed in the Nepalese Communist movement because the Maoists in Nepal, although always in minority, had broken off from the CPN as early as 1962. By 1966, they had been able to consolidate their position outside the party without formally organizing a party of their own, based on the Maoist strategy of revolution. The Indian Maoists, on the other hand, had still been operating within the CPI(M) and persistently waging an inner-party ideological crusade. They had to wait till 1969, when, under the express CPC directive to ‘demarcate themselves from the neo-revisionist leader of the CPI(M)’, they broke away from the CPI(M) and founded India’s third Communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

It may be remembered that the Naxalbari Peasant Uprising, which had erupted in the Spring of 1967, petered out in the face of heavy police action. After this, Naxalbari, which came to be reckoned as a symbolism for a definite ideology, caught the city-bred Maoists like a contagion and the Kolkata megalopolis became the main theatre of operation for the Naxalites during the period between 1967 and 1971 before the India–Pakistan war over Bangladesh was on. At this stage, the India-Nepal and India–Bangladesh borders were largely quiet excepting a few acts of subversion, including murders and kidnappings, committed by the Naxalites. The Jhapa district in eastern Nepal, in particular, where the Nepali Maoists had reportedly liberated areas with the help of the local poor and landless peasants, was largely free from any tensions. The ferment began at a later stage when the region was used by the Indian Maoists as a sanctuary.

Ever since the Yahya regime launched the campaign of genocide on the people of East Pakistan from the night of 25 March 1971, reports of a sporadic armed struggle for the liberation of Bangladesh started pouring in. This opened the floodgates of cooperation among the Maoists of India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The fact that they had been operating in unison from the early days of the military crackdown in the former East Pakistan was confirmed when the Kolkata police seized a document during the course of their raids on the Naxalite hideouts in the city which contained a congratulatory message from Mohammad Toha of the Communist Party of East Pakistan (Marxist-Leninist) to Charu Mazumdar, chief of the CPI (M-L).

At one stage it was apprehended that a prolonged war of liberation in Bangladesh would give rise to serious political convulsions with far-reaching consequences in the subcontinent and that the trans-national extremist movement would fully exploit the situation by fomenting subversion and anarchy in theregion. Convinced by the Chinese propaganda offensive that India ‘was being used as a military base as a part of the worldwide conspiracy of the American imperialism and the Soviet social imperialism to attack China’, the Maoists resolved to wage a protracted people’s war by mobilizing the disgruntled elements in collaboration with the fundamentalist and pro-Pakistani forces in Bangladesh. The situation, however, could only be saved when the Indian security forces went into operation against the Pakistan army in close cooperation with the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) of Bangladesh.

Even after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1972, it was reported that extremist leaders from a wide area encompassing India, Bangladesh and Nepal had formed a joint committee of action and intensified Maoist propaganda. The Indian Maoists who, under the guidance of Kanu Sanyal, had built up a sanctuary in the easternmost Terai district of Jhapa in Nepal along the Naxalbari border, were working in close collaboration with the Nepali Maoists under the leadership of Mohan Chandra Adhikari, then a politburo member of the pro-Beijing faction of the outlawed Communist Party of Nepal. In the wake of the liberation of Bangladesh, they were reported to have collected modern weapons and dumped them at different places in eastern Nepal. Given the difficult topography of the remote villages with dense forests and riverine areas stretching to the Jhapa and Bhadrapur areas of eastern Nepal, it was almost an uphill task for those in charge of law and order to follow and contain the elusive extremist elements that had been operating for a long time across the international border of the two neighbouring states. With the easy flow of arms from Bangladesh and eastern Nepal’s potential as a sanctuary and operational base, there could be little surprise that the resurgence of large-scale ultra-left activities took place in that trans-border region where the ‘Spring Thunder’ had set off the first sparks in 1967.

The Resurrection

Mirroring the split in the Indian Communist Movement, the Nepalese Communist Party also witnessed a schism in 1994, when the Samjukt Jan Morcha ofBaburam Bhattarai broke off from the parent party.

Initially, however, that schism did not have any ideological bearing. Although Baburam’s Jan Morcha faction had managed to bag nine seats in the 1991 parliamentary elections, it did not have any formal electoral alliance with the Nepalese leftist forces including the CPN under Manmohan Adhikari. Thus, when the leftist forces under Manmohan Adhikari formed the government after the resignation of the G.P. Koirala ministry in 1994, no leader of the Jan Morcha was inducted into the new government. This provoked Bhattarai to launch an ideological tirade against the Nepalese leftist elements who, according to Bhattarai, were capitulationists and had totally digressed from the Marxist-Leninist tenets by embracing peaceful parliamentarism. In 1996, when the new left extremist outfit, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was formed, Bhattarai’s Jan Morcha immediately threw in its lot with the new party which spewed its resolve to bring about a Maoist style revolution in Nepal by resorting to a ‘people’s war’.

Organization of the CPN (Maoist)

A look into the organizational structure of the CPN (Maoist) should be made before analyzing the strategy and tactics of the projected ‘New Democratic Revolution’ of the party and its operational activities in Nepal for the last nine years.

Pushpakamal Dahal (nicknamed Prachanda) is the chairman of the CPN (Maoist) and the supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army, Baburam Bhattarai, the party’s ace ideologue, represents the political face of the CPN (Maoist) as the convenor of the United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC), and Krishna Bahadur Rana is the joint convenor of the URPC. The party has thus two distinct fronts: the political organization with a politburo, a central committee, regional bureaus, sub-regional bureaus, district committees, local committees and cell committees—the nucleus of the party organization. Since the CPN (Maoist) is essentially an underground organization, the cell committees are of absolute importance for the party’s operational success. Like the CPI (M-L) in the early 1970s, an operational cell is usually composed of a cell leader and a small but unspecified number of cell activists operating directly as a unit. The leader issues directives and assigns duties to the cell’s action squads. Usually, he is in contact the members of the action squads through faceless couriers. The organization chart of the cell committee of the CPN (Maoist) is fairly uncomplicated, as shown below:

 

Table 6.1 Organization Chart of the Cell Committee of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

 

The size of an operational cell usually depends upon its assigned tasks, but it is kept as small as practicable in order to avoid undesirable exposure and capture by the security forces. The cell is kept compartmentalized to protect the chain of the underground organizations and to reduce to the minimum the vulnerability of the cell members. This also restricts the information that any member of the action squad has about the identity, background and the current residence of any other cell member. He knows his fellow activists by their aliases and the means by which they can be contacted and reached. This structure is built on the terrorist underground ‘fail safe’ principle: if one element in the cell fails, the shockwaves should be minimal for the chain of the party organization. The cell committee is highly centralized with directives flowing from the party high command throughout the party organization; this tends to increase the efficiency and the incidence of successful operations. On the other hand, the organization of the CPI (M-L) in the late 1960s and the early 1970s was rather decentralized and dysfunctional, with units in various parts of the country operating autonomously. It was found during 1970–71 that the action squads of the party had gone out of control and the party leadership had no alternative but to hail every violent stray action as a spontaneous outburst, thereby taking the Maoist revolution in India to its higher stage. The doom of the Indian Maoist outfits was signalled in the 1970s because of unusual centralization of authority at the top and complete carte blanche for expression and action at the bottom.

On the military front, the People’s Liberation Army spearheads the revolutionary guerrilla warfare of the CPN (Maoist). The PLA has a central military commission, regional military commissions and the district military commissions. The chief of the PLA’s guerrilla operations at present is Ram Bahadur Thapa, alias Badal.

Ideological Bases of the CPN (Maoist)

In an article entitled ‘A Brief Introduction to the Policies of the CPN (Maoist)’, published on 12 January 2004, the party’s chairman Prachanda observed that the guiding principle of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) would be Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, and the Party’s objective would be socialism and communism. He further emphasized that in the ultimate struggle, the party’s ideological structure would be a synthesis between Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and ‘the Prachanda Path’. In other words, the LPN (Maoist)’s ideological base would rest on a close study of the historical, social and political conditions of Nepal as seen through the Marxist–Maoist spectacle. The ‘Prachanda Path’ would be the key to the forthcoming revolution in Nepal, through the military strategy of the People’s War.

The CPN (Maoist) envisioned the establishment of a republican state of Nepal to begin with, and aimed to follow this up with a new constitution of the country with the following agenda:

1. Politically, the party seeks to give to the people of Nepal the ultimate political power to elect their own representative government through a democratic electoral process.
2. In terms of its economic policy, the party prescribes revolutionary land reforms for ‘judicious distribution of land on the principle of the land to the tiller’.
3. An interesting aspect of the future foreigh-policy projection of the party, in Prachands’s own words, is the objective of an ‘independent foreigh policy of maintaining friendly relations with all on the basis of Panchsheel’, and the ‘abrogation of all unequal treaties from the past and contribution of new treaties and agreements on a new basis’.

Prachanda concluded his article by saying that ‘it is obvious that these immediate policies reflect the most flexible and democratic methods for [a] peaceful and forward-looking political solution to the ongoing civil war in the country. However, the old feudal regime that has lost all support and confidence of the people is unleashing a naked military terror on the people relying on the military assistance of imperialism’⁷

The CPN (Maoist) in Operation

It was evident that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was determined to establish a ‘people’s government’ in the country through the Maoist style ‘people’s war’. On 4 February 1996, it sent a 40-point memorandum to the then Nepalese government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, demanding the abolition of the institution of monarchy along with its existing privileges, promulgation of a republican constitution, and the abolition of the Mahakali treaty with India. As usual, the Deuba government treated the memorandum as too infantile and audacious.

Within 10 days after the Deuba government’s refusal to take a serious view of the Maoists’ ultimatum, the CPN (Maoist) carried out a series of well-orchestrated armed attacks mainly in the mid-western and central hill areas and the western terai region of Nepal. Successful armed raids in the form of ambushes, mining, commando attacks and subversions were carried out indiscriminately in different parts of the country. The insurgent activities, which started from the three mid-western hill districts of Rolpa, Rukum and Jajarkot, the western district of Gorkha and the eastern district of Sindhuli, gradually escalated and covered 68 out of the 75 districts of Nepal by the end of 2004. The bulletin of the CPN (Maoist), entitled ‘Maoistlnformation Bulletin-8’, dated 20 January 2004 declared that ‘as per the party’s known policy of granting autonomous rule along with the rights of self-determination to the oppressed nationalities and regions, a campaign is now underway to form autonomous revolutionary people’s governments in liberated areas. After completing the process of forming elected people’s committees at village and district levels on the basis of revolutionary united front policies, currently regional level people’s governments a re being installed in different parts of the country. On 9 January 2004, [the] Magarat Autonomous Region People’s Government was declared … The Autonomous People’s Government was formed under the leadership of Santosh Budha Magar. Similarly on 19 January 2004 Bheri Karnali Autonomous Region People’s Government was formed under the leadership of Khadga Bahadur B.K. and made public amidst a big mass rally in Jajarkot district… The bulletin further declared that such autonomous people’s governments would soon be formed in Seti-Mahakali region, Tharuwan, Tamuwan, Tamang Region, Kirat and Madhesh.

Meanwhile, the URPC issued a ‘Directory for Administration of People’s Power, 2004’ in order to bring ‘harmony into the administration of the local people’s power in the base areas throughout the country. In this Directory, separate chapters are included for the administration of Autonomous Regions and Local Bodies, General Administration, Public Policy, Revolutionary Land Reforms, Forest management, Industry, Commerce and Finance, People’s Cooperatives, Physical lnfrastructural Development, Public Health, Public Education, People’s Education, People’s Culture and Social Welfare. Similarly, a Public Legal Code has been formulated to administer the New Democratic People’s power’.

It is, thus, apparent from the series of developments in Nepal during the last nine years and also by the admissions of the Royal Nepalese government that currently as much as two-thirds of the Nepalese territory has been under the effective control of the Maoist insurgents, at least by nightfall.

Since the onset of the Maoist insurgency in 1996, successive governments in Nepal have displayed extreme naivete and pusillanimity in treating the Maoist guerrilla operations simply as a ‘law and order’ problem. Attempts were made to contain Maoists through a host of anti-terrorist operations codenamed ‘Operation Romeo’, ‘Jungle Search Operation’, ‘Search and Destroy’, and ‘Kilo Sera Two’. The state security operations, combining both the police and the Royal Nepalese Army to encircle and annihilate the Maoists, was a mindless move similar to the prerevolutionary Chiang Kai-Shek’s state terrorism in China to exterminate the Communists, who had been waging a determined people’s partisan war under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The anti-terrorist violence let loose by the Royal Nepalese Government had not only become counter-productive but had also taken a heavy toll of the Nepalese civilian population. During the first quarter of 2005, as many as 11,000 Nepalese people had been killed, and this killing spree has claimed only few Maoist guerrillas.

Despite the campaign to exterminate the Maoists—real or imagined—there has been no let-up in the hit-and-run guerrilla operations by the People’s Liberation Army of the CPN (Maoist). Hundreds of dropouts from schools in the countryside are swelling the ranks of the guerrilla fighters. In the ‘Maoist Information Bulletin 9’, an occasional information sheet published by the CPN (Maoist), dated 28 March 2004, it was reported that there were altogether 5,000 Maoist guerrillas in the western region of Nepal, around 3,000 in the eastern region and 2,000 more scattered all over the country. At a rough estimate, around 10,000 hardcore Maoist guerrillas were fighting security forces all over Nepal. It has also reported that around 200,000 youth and students are under rigorous military training in the impregnable jungles of Nepal. Initially, the PLA guerrilla were operating with rudimentary and homemade firearms. Highlighting this aspect of the Maoist guerrilla warfare in Nepal at the early stages, the same bulletin exulted:

While the People’s war was initiated, the Maoists did not have [the] people’s liberation army, as they have today. At that very moment, they also did not have base areas and broad mass base as they have today. Again, while the great saga of people’s war roared on the earth of Nepal, there were limited Maoist guerrillas fighting with rudimentary guns (bharuwa banduk)and eating cornflower (shatu ko dhuto), just as the great revolutionary heroes of China defeated Japanese imperialist aggressors with home-made millets and rudimentary bullets. With the energy of bharuwa banduk and shatu ko dhuto, Maoist revolutionaries have seized AK-47 and M-16 rifles as well as billions of rupees and properties of the enemies looted from the people during the whole history of the reactionary rule in Nepal. If the bharuwa banduk and shatu have been capable enough to seize the sophisticated [weapons sent by America, shouldn’t] nation-wide power be in the hands of the people with the help of those weapons?

It was reported from the Indo-Nepal border that serious ideological differences had surfaced between the CPN (Maoist) chairman, Prachanda, and his deputy and URPC chief, Baburam Bhattarai, who is known for his relatively moderate approach towards the strategy and tactics of a people’s war that Prachanda advocates. Consequently, Bhattarai was expelled from the party politburo. At one stage, the ideological difference took on the dimension of power rivalry between Prachanda and Bhattarai, who accused Prachanda of concentrating all the power and authority of the party in his own hands by running both the political and military wings. The ideological-factional differences between them seem to have been patched up, indicated by Bhattarai’s reinstation by Prachanda in the politburo’s highest policy-making committee. The report also quoted Prachanda as saying that ‘there is no alternative to unity among all people-oriented parties against the feudal autocracy and to establish full democracy’ and, as such, ‘differences within the party have been resolved on the basis of criticisms and introspection’.

Notwithstanding the reports of inner-party differences, the people’s war in Nepal has been raging with all the potentialities of an eventual victory of the Maoists, sparking a quick metamorphosis of the country’s political system from a multi-party democracy to a communist state. As time rolls on, the Maoist ranks are swelling thick and fast with more and more insurgents finding sanctuaries provided by the poverty-stricken masses all over Nepal. One observer rightly pointed out that ‘poverty in Nepal… has grown exponentially. There are as yet no safety valves to take care of [the] anger increasingly churning among the Nepalese peasantry, the lower middle classes … In the early phase of the post-1950 era, the Nepal Congress Party and the Koiralas provided some hope. However, as the decades succeeded one another, both got gradually assimilated into the ruling class. For a while, radical presence from the middle classes, exemplified by the Pushpalals and Sahana Pradhans—who too had earlier taken shelter in India and were proximate to communist formations—offered a second layer of hope. Things are moving fast and the generations of Prachandas and the Bhattarais is apparently outflanking the senior radicals. On paper the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) has a larger membership roll than the Maoists. The ground reality in the villages tells a different story though. At least this conclusion seem legitimate in the light of the extent of hold the Maoists have been able to exercise in the remote provinces’.⁸

In the present context of the political imbroglio in Nepal, the Maoist insurgency in that country assumes all the more significance as it must be viewed in the light of Nepal’s history of the communist movement. An analyst of Nepalese politics observes that ‘the communist movement in Nepal that first appeared in 1949 after the formation of the Communist party of Nepal under the leadership of the late Pushpalal Shrestha emerged as an opposition to Nepali Congress’s policy of compromise…. The participating intellectuals in this movement had comprised upper caste Brahmin-Chhetri-Newar (BCN). In other words, the past movements were basically the movements against the BCN ruling elite by the BCN non-ruling elite. That scenario, however, has changed now in view of the broader participation of persons from other castes particularly the untouchable castes such as Kami, Sarki, and Damai. In the past, when non-ruling BCNs were fighting the ruling BCNs, there was always scope for mediation and compromise due to the network of family relations. No such network of family relations exists now between the BCN elite and the guerrillas coming from untouchable lower castes, which narrows the chances of mediation and compromise’.⁹

The Nepal Inferno and India’s Security

It is important to point out in this context that the Maoist insurgency is not simply a problem of the Himalayan kingdom alone because it has already had a spillover effect on the Indian mainland where their Indian counterparts are already engaged in insurgency operations in the countryside. Figures available with the New Delhibased Institute for Conflict Management show that between November 2003 and September 2004, the Indian Maoists’ presence expanded from 55 districts in nine states to 156 districts in 13 states, a bewildering average growth of two districts per week. By February 2005, statistics indicate that the number had further gone up to 170 districts in 15 states, thereby creating a Red corridor that connects eastern parts of India, including the Nepal Maoists, down to the deep south.¹⁰ The arrests of the Nepalese Maoists from different Indian cities have already confirmed that the Maoists on either side of the international border are operating in close collaboration. The scenario has assumed a more disquieting dimension following the merger of the CPI(M-L)-People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI) in September 2004. These two outfits, which roughly account for around 90 per cent of the country’s left extremists, have merged into a united Communist Party of India (Maoist).

That the Indian Maoists and their Nepalese counterparts have joined hands in cross-border guerrilla hit-and-run operations became a fait accompli when they jointly struck at Madhuban in the adjoining East Champaran district of Bihar. The chain of events leading from Madhuban to Bargainia has provided sufficient clues about the active involvement of the Nepalese Maoists in Bihar. With the active collaboration from the Nepalese Maoists, the CPI (Maoist) has been trying to create a ‘revolutionary compact zone’ right from Nepal to the south of Jharkhand and beyond. The recent spurt of clandestine meetings between the Nepalese and the Indian Maoists in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal—from where the first flickers of the Naxalbari peasant uprising in the spring of 1967 threatened to spread like a prairie fire—strongly suggest the possibility of building a network between the Maoists on either side with the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation as well as the extremist elements from Bhutan and Bangladesh who find shelter in North Bengal. In order to bring all these Maoist elements under one operational network recently, the leaders of all these sundry groups set up a ‘Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations in South Asia’ (COMPOSA). This organization will soon be holding its fourth annual international conference somewhere in the long Red corridor stretching from Andhra Pradesh to Nepal.

The gripping scenario of the irresistible Red spread has prompted India’s internal security think tanks to admit somewhat disarmingly that the scourge of the Maoist guerrilla operations presents the most serious threat to India’s already sclerotic democratic political system.

The View from Delhi

Nepal is traditionally viewed as the ‘strategic partner’ in the Indian security system. Unfortunately, nowhere has India’s strategic-diplomatic approach been so perennially pusillanimous and nai:ve as in its Nepal policy.

Before entering into any analysis of India’s Nepal policy one has to take a very hard look at the topographic location of the Himalayan kingdom. Nepal has an overwhelming geostrategic significance. Newslook,Nepal’s leading online news magazine, dated 12 January 2005, published a report from Stratfor, the Austinbased reputed intelligence farm, which declared:

…a landlocked country, where only tourism matters for the international economy, Nepal has a strong geostrategic value to world powers. The power that stations its spacelinked surveillance, intelligence and navigation systems on Nepal’s high mountains gets strategic leverage over several Asian regions, from Central Asia to South-East Asia. Bordering only China and India, Nepal also offers a geopolitical advantage to whichever takes the upper hand there. Such a situation would be especially dangerous to India, since Nepal’s border is 185 miles away from New Delhi. Though major conflict is unlikely in even the distant future, Indian strategists appreciate the military capability China would gain. Attacking from Nepal would represent a deadly threat to the Indian capital … Nepal is likely headed toward even more difficult times with the probable change of its entire political system, from multiparty democracy to communist State. If current trends are unchanged, the chaos could ultimately lead to the government’s collapse and the potential victory of the Maoist rebels. Given the country’s invaluable geostrategic location, literally at the top of Eurasia, this will give a dramatic advantage to Beijing’s geopolitical position on the continent while causing major problems for India. Whether the future Nepal government becomes Maoist or communist, the government will likely lean toward Beijing, and will allow for establishment of Chinese surveillance and listening posts … China’s presence in Nepal would also complicate positions of the US Navy in the Indian Ocean. With early warning, surveillance, intelligence and navigation systems in Nepal, Beijing would keep a vast part of Asia and military forces under constant electronic watch.

It is an irony right from the beginning of the post-independent India’s tryst with history that the basic minimum requirements of the country’s security both from external and internal threats were either overlooked or were played down, especially during the Nehru era. Since Nehru and his Defence Minister Krishna Menon were basking under the warmth of the Panch Sheel and the Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai obsessions during the 1950s and the 1960s, we were faced with a sad military debacle following the India–China border war of 1962. Later, the Indian defence system was pumped up with all sorts of military hardware and the country could ably tackle the subsequent armed stand-offs with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971.

Although our defence capability was successfully enhanced, the hard realities of the country’s security scenario remained ill-perceived. In fact, India has always maintained a tentative façade of foreign relations sans a foreign policy realpolitik. It has been consistently marked with diplomatic myopia, disarming naivete and gross ad hocism.Citing the frailties of India’s foreign policy-makers in the recent past in the context of our present Nepal policy, one observer writes.

The MEA has neither imbibed the lessons of the ham-handed intrusive diplomacy practised in Sri Lanka in the late eighties, nor counted the costs of playing democratic evangelists in Myanmar in the mid-nineties. Both these foreign policy disasters had serious national security consequenses.¹¹

Nor have we done any better in dealing with our eastern neighbour, Bangladesh, in the liberation of which much blood was sacrificed by our armed forces. Our obsessive security syndrome vis-à-vis our neighbours has spurned away the countries without having any credibility insofar as India’s friendship is concerned. In fact, the South Bloc has always been in the habit of dealing with our neighbours in terms of a British colonial type of ‘subordinate cooperation’. It is, indeed, a sad story of complicated idiosyncrasy that notwithstanding the geographical compulsions for sharing the same subcontinental space, community of sociolinguistic heritage and the imperatives of economic interdependence, India has consistently fared badly in securing the credibility of her immediate neighbours.

Looking at the current Nepal inferno, it can be said that traditionally India’s handling of the Himalayan kingdom has been both faulty and short-sighted. It is pertinent to point out that the monarchy in Nepal has never been a reliable friend of India and the institution of monarchy in that country has been the perennial source of political instability and unpredictability. Inevitably, therefore, politics in Nepal endemically came to be charged with the penchant for gunpowder among sundry political actors in that country.

Historically, there is no denying the fact that India had a big hand after the British pull-out in reinstalling the institution of monarchy in Nepal. An observer has rightly pointed out that

…it was Jawaharlal Nehru’s grave mistake to have restored King Tribhuvan to the throne at Kathmandu in 1950. Tribhuvan’s progeny has always tried to play the China card against New Delhi. His son, Mahendra, did so to get legitimacy for himself after arresting Nepal’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, B. P. Koirala, in 1960. Mahendra’s son, Birendra, went to the extent of importing arms from China, leading to the Indian trade embargo against Nepal in 1989. Monarchists in Nepal have time and again equated Nepali nationalism with anti-Indianism. Although instability in Nepal has always been blamed on political parties and external forces (read India), history shows that monarchy and its institutions have been at the centre of all political controversies and upheavals. This was true of the initiation of the Rana regime; the 1960 royal coup against democracy; the Narayanhiti Palace massacre of 2001; the dissolution of parliament on 4 October 2002; and King Gyanendra’s coup ofl February 2005. There is not a single instance, except when King Prithvinarayan Shah brought some rag-tag kingdoms together in 1776, of monarchy being a source of stability in Nepal. Contrary to India’s foreign policy mantra, the monarchy is a major source of instability in Nepal ¹²

In fact, Gyanendra’s coup of February 2005 was a sad commentary on India’s diplomatic inability to read the writing on the wall when it failed to recognize that the inevitable was coming when, on 4 October 2002, Gyanendra dissolved Parliament. After 1962, India’s ostrichlike behaviour was no more glaring than when she woke up in a cold sweat on 1 February 2005 with the RNA juggernaut rolling in Kathmandu. India was simply paid back her own coin.

Even after the royal coup, India’s Nepal policy became all the more tentative as it got enmeshed in a lot of ifs and buts. First of all, it is really intriguing why the royal coup of 1 February 2005, executed so meticulously at the behest of and in active collaboration with the Royal Nepalese Army, came as a complete surprise to New Delhi. The RAW was virtually caught napping. Then, for the next three weeks, there came a flurry of statements comments and speculations before New Delhi could venture to suspend its military assistance to Kathmandu. Was this decision preceded by a wishful thinking that King Gyanendra would give up his authoritarian power and restore the democratic process with a little browbeating by Delhi? India was clearly dithering on a plan to ride roughshod over the Nepalese defence establishments by taking a hard decision to clamp a ban on arms supply because of the existing 10-year military assistance pact that was signed with Nepal four years ago. Curiously, India had to ‘let go’ the arms already in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, King Gyanendra was not sitting idle at the Narayanhiti Palace. After India froze arms supply, he managed to stockpile most of the arms required from diverse sources. Pakistan had already rushed in with an open offer to supply arms to the kingdom. On the other hand, the king’s unscheduled stopover in China on a trip from Indonesia—put Delhi on tenterhooks. And then came the amusing volte face from Delhi as strategic considerations compelled India totemper its concerns over democracy and take a ‘look’ at resuming military assistance to Nepal.

The inevitable signal was conveyed at Jakarta in the third week of April 2005, within two months after clamping a freeze on arms supply to Nepal, at the first meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and King Gyanendra after the monarch had seized power through a coup on 1 February. In a bald assertion, the king claimed that he got a positive nod from India on the resumption of military assistance, which had been put on hold after the elected government was overthrown in Nepal. But the Indian side hastened to throw in a rider by saying that the Indian premier had assured the king ‘to look into it in a proper perspective’, thereby trying desperately to link the arms supply with an assurance from Kathmandu of a roadmap to restore democracy.

There is an inside story on India’s double U-turn over the ticklish question of the resumption of military assistance to Nepal. Outside public gaze, there was a grim battle of wills between the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the defence establishments, with the India Army mounting pressure on the MEA in support of a ‘brother army’ that needed urgent arms assistance. The Indian Army is the chief international patron of the RNA and there is a unique relationship between the two armies in that as a convention their chiefs are honorary generals of the other army. Thus, the recent move by Indian Army Chief General J.J. Singh’s lobbying through the media on this issue amounted to shuttle military diplomacy. The Indian Army was also concerned about the spillover effect that the Maoist rebellion in the Himalayan kingdom could have on India. The army establishment also impressed upon the Government of India that the analyses fed to New Delhi from Kathmandu by the intelligence outfits like the Research and Analytical Wing were at variance with the military assessment of the objective conditions prevailing in the countryside outside Kathmandu.

What has been of great worry for India is the fact that Gyanendra, as the Supreme Commander of the Nepalese Armed Forces, has been relentlessly trying to source military hardware and training of personnel from other countries, notably China and Pakistan. The RNA, which operates with Indian arms and ammunition, claims that China already supplies it with truckloads of military equipment. The RNA Chief, General Pyar Jung Thapa, recently led a delegation to Pakistan and claimed that Islamabad had offered to train RNA personnel. Although the initial Chinese reaction to the royal coup in Nepal was to pass it off as an ‘internal matter’ of Nepal, later Chinese overtures towards Kathmandu were quite unnerving for New Delhi. The unsettled border question between India and China, coupled with India’s recent ‘Look East’ ventures in which India is likely to emerge as the trading competitor of China, may portend a critical situation for India insofar as New Delhi’s future relations with Kathmandu are concerned. Nepal has, thus, turned out to be a classical turf for India–China diplomatic-strategic maneuverings. Any false step on the slopes of the Himalayan kingdom could land New Delhi in dire straits. India’s fond hope of Chinese neutrality towards the Nepal imbroglio is in all probability going to be wishful thinking. New Delhi, therefore, has very little scope for reckless acrobatics in the present scenario. India’s official stand was that military ties with Nepal and, specifically, the issue of resuming arms supplies to the RNA was ‘under constant review’.

It is very pertinent to point out that following the Jakarta dialogue between Premier Manmohan Singh and King Gyanendra, the resumption of military aid to the king would signal the withering away of the parliamentary democratic process. In an article entitled ‘The Harakiri Decision’, Ashok Mitra writes, ‘India’s unilateral decision to underwrite the king in the face of strong reservations expressed by the Nepali National Congress implies that whatever urban sections in Nepal were still with the democratic parties will now switch over in scampering promptitude towards the direction of the Maoists. If the Indian authorities are hoping that by bolstering royalty through military aid, they would contain the advance of Maoist adventurism, they are living in a fool’s paradise. Their initiative will actually accelerate the spread of Maoist influence all over Nepal’.¹³ Although there is no denying the fact that the Maoist strategy of guerrilla warfare has a military aspect, its political dimensions cannot be underestimated. There is a host of cases to show that an insurgency essentially has to be dealt with only politically. For this, the Nepalese political forces need to be strengthened, and not the army.

On the May Day of 2005, the emergency was lifted and King Gyanendra promised to hold municipal elections. These events sent New Delhi into raptures and the National Security Council reiterated its faith in the Nepalese monarchy in the second week of August 2005. Even the Indian Prime Minister hoped that King Gyanendra could be converted from a despotic executive to a constitutional monarch. Deb Mukharji, a former Indian Ambassador to Nepal, who had the privilege of watching the whirlpool of Nepalese politics from close quarters, held a contrary view on the high drama surrounding the withdrawal of emergency. He writes:‘there is considerable discussion and comment on the “lifting” of the emergency, and perhaps an air of satisfaction that this has been due to pressures exerted by India and others. This is, at best, only partially true because constitionally the emergency could not go beyond three months unless the Nepali administration chose to be publicly defiant of internal and international opinion and engage in convoluted constitutional procedures, now more awkward in the absence of a parliament. It was thus “expiry” rather than “lifting” of the emergency for which undue credit is being both given and taken. The intent of the government is not reflected in what could tum out to be only a cosmetic measure, while harsh and restrictive steps are taken by other means. Only the coming weeks would show if there is any honest desire for dialogue and restoration of the suppressed political processes and freedom of expression. Any celebration of the ending of the emergency is presently premature’¹⁴ The sinister Royal Corruption Control Commission set up by the king is a definite pointer to the fact that the king is in no mood to relent. The Commission is an instrument in the king’s hands to strike at the very roots of parliamentary democracy in Nepal by delegitimizing the political parties through a vicious attack on the honesty and integrity of the country’s senior political leaders.

The Nepalese people, with whom our destiny is inextricably bound, must be encouraged to chart their own democratic political process howsoever it might have looked during the last few decades. Unfortunately, however, the political parties and groups in Nepal are so fractious and ridden with internal squabbles that India should keep open all possible channels of communications with them. Otherwise, in the long run, the much-cherished idioms of Nepalese parliamentary practices, which had been sent into hibernation, will be dug up and trampled under the pounding boots of the RNA and the Maoists. India’s national interests and strategic security cannot be mortgaged to the idiosyncrasies and amateurishness of the South Block.

Epilogue

King Gyanendra’s reign in Nepal has been marked by turmoil, starting from his bizarre ascension to the dissolution of the Nepalese Parliament in February 2005, justified in view of growing Maoist insurgency. Violent clashes between the RNA and the Maoist posed an affront to any hopes of a peaceful agitation towards the restoration of democracy. While the latter decided not to stretch their ceasefire given the King’s express instructions of an offensive stance against any contending views, the monarch believed that the unity between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists built on the ideas of total democracy would not be sustained for long. Instead, this friendship led to the signing of the 12-points by the SPA and the Maoists, because it did not carry a guarantee from the king that he would not usurp power again. By then the level of protests and demonstrations had escalated to a point beyond precedence. On 24 April, a day before the SPA’s ‘million people march’, Gyanendra addressed the nation and agreed to hand over power and sovereignty back to the people (with no conditions), while expressing sorrow for the loss of lives that had resulted from the prolonged violence. The 19-day people’s war in which men, women and the youth of Nepal participated to oust the totalitarian king had succeeded where even the 10-year Maoist insurgence (which had claimed more than 12,500 lives) could not.